The Garden of Time: A Royal Visitation on Silken Wings

Everything changed perfectly

The moment arranged by those that came before

The cone flower petals fading like old cloth,

the last drops from some antique silken scrap of pink

color-drained, absorbed slowly, by time passing

The crumpled-plush leaves of aging foxglove, spires with their heads chopped off, a faded cathedral,

Spears of the daylily patch that has run through all its days,

browning, slipping groundward in the annual decline,

keeping time with the sun

A patient breeze, sure as a hand opening,

a finger gesturing to a change in the light,

A silent annunciation, angels of the hour

interrupting their conversation on res naturae

to speak in hushed tones of a gilded glow

of a morning concealed some hours behind the slackening

Returning now, polished, makeup freshened, nine a.m. blush 

It arrives, royalty, in a hurry from nowhere

in particular,

channeling the gold and the glimmer of morning sun

into the stained-glass windows of of its wings

the royal visitor, flitting its moment upon the stage

drawn like a lover to the tiny chalice of a still lively phlox

a quick kiss at a deep pink, a morning moue,

a bestowal of favor,

then a hop to another taller spike of the same, late-season specimen,

sampling the belles of the perennial ball,

the queen of the flowering retinue,

the same dip and sample, the hurried embrace,

the royal peck, the foreshortened audience

barely time to catch up, businesslike, in the end:

look, pal, what have you got for me?

Then, wings aflicker, some slight unsayable shimmer

Is there a boundary between accident and will?

Does a Monarch progress in the air

purely by whim

Does it plough the imperceptible currents of the breeze

by the moment's imprint

or as a wisp of breeze communicates a flutter in the Tao?

its flight delicate beyond imagination

less willful than a paper napkin puffed by the wind

Its royal progress paints a tail through the morning air

on a creature sketched by wings of tinted light

into the somewhere beyond, crimped by  

the first obstacle of the middle distance

Royal and insouciant

as if the world

were its

to command